Cuomo ‘hap, hap, happy’ on budget, process

The budget is all about the results, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said this morning during a radio interview, and he is “hap hap happy.”

The state Senate approved the state’s $135.1 billion spending plan early this morning, and the Assembly is scheduled to return Thursday to take up and pass the bills. That the state will adopt a new budget before the April 1 deadline for the third consecutive year is “irrefutable proof that government is working,” Cuomo said, as opposed to a slog of late budgets that “embarrassed” legislators and would “degrade” confidence in government.

“It’s a new record. Government is working. It’s a smart, sound budget,” Cuomo told Susan Arbetter on “The Capitol Pressroom.”

Cuomo brushed aside criticism of the minimum wage increase that the budget contains — the spending plan would raise the hourly rate from $7.25 to $9 by 2016.

“The $9 by the end of 2015: that is president Obama’s proposal,” Cuomo, a Democrat, said. “I don’t believe any other state has passed it. I know the federal government hasn’t passed it. So in many ways, we’re leading the nation with this, so I’m proud of that.”

Obama’s proposal would index the minimum wage to inflation, which New York’s pending law does not do. Cuomo said this was done to placate Republicans in the state Senate, but also, “an index would limit what it is by formula, sort of limit your discretion.”

He also said a tax credit that covers the cost of higher wages for seasonally hired 16 to 19 year olds was put in to placate Republican demands for a “training wage.” Cuomo said that hike would apply to a “small universe” of mostly “college students.”

Republicans now control the Senate as part of a coalition with a renegade Democrat and the five-member Independent Democratic Conference. Bronx Sen. Jeff Klein, leader of the IDC, had a seat in private budget negotiations, which Cuomo said made things “more complicated.”

“In the old orientation there were two sides … and everyone has to have something to get the package done. This is the art of the possible, and the art of a compromise to actually reach consensus,” he said. “Here it became three-sided.”

“They passed the bill,” he added. “So it worked.”

And the overnight session? Cuomo dismissed criticism and noted the “peculiar situation” this year where the budget deadline brushed against Passover and Holy Week.

“Albany has institutional critics that just always love to raise the contrary. Some people have said, oh, they shouldn’t do it late at night. I could have done what’s called a message of necessity so they could have done it during the day, [but] ‘Oh, no no, you can’t do a message of necessity, that’s bad too.’ All right, then they have to vote at night. But, ‘oh, they should vote during the day.’ But they have religious holidays, and then we have to make everybody a pagan. ”